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Yay! I just got back and we won chairmans award (highest award in robotics), but we dropped out of the actual competition from the quarterfinals. Sucks, but there were 68 teams competiting, so its all good.

Oh well. Congradulations to Spaceboy2000, whose team with a total offensive robot, brought home 63rd place

Shame on both of you!

I bet it's all the fault of the rest of the team since Mike never give up

at least its somthing, so... good job!

Okay, I'm going to go on a rant because I'm pissed.

Our robot is what is best known as a "bully bot". Basically, a guy with lots of power, that pushes and shoves other robots around. AKA the asshole robot that pisses everyone off.

First of all, we went to the Sacremento Regionals first. We came 8th, and we were able to beat the teams from NASA, who were undefeated until we owned them. We had an arm, which was scrapped after one arm because it wasn't as good as we liked. So we took it off, and had fun shoving other people around.

Fast forward a few weeks to this weekend. In the GTA regional, we were once again the bully. We had a flipper, and scrapped it due to poor handling. Actually, we were THE bully bot. For example, we shoved Yoshi's bot into a goal. Sure, they got out after 20 seconds, and won the match, but hey! we got a 50 point penalty, which is nearly impossible to win with. Actually, we just got 40, and one of our allies got the other 10. Nothing compared to the 70 we racked up at Sacremento, but I'm getting off topic now.

Proof of our awesomeness? We took on three teams by ourselves, as one robot didn't even show up, and the other died 5 seconds into the game. We TIED the game, though we should've won, but some asshole ref decided to hand us a 10 point penalty.

Ah, the ref. You know there's something wrong when it's the same ref handing us penalties, out to get us EVERYTIME, and nobody else. And he has yet to explain how a 10 inch high robot can, without any arms or extending mechanism, descore (meaning remove) a tetra from a EIGHT FOOT high goal! Sure, we had SPRINGS on the freaking robot that shot us that high! Or wait, it was the jetpacks, or maybe the anti-gravity device we strapped on. I don't know how the heck we passed inspection, but hey, the ref has a point! We descored a tetra by defying the laws of physics!

And did I mention the game where we slammed head on with another robot? We were running at each other, and when we collided, they wobbled a bit and tipped onto their arm. Five seconds later, they stablize themselves and get back into the game...and rams one of OUR team member, flipping him onto the ground on its back and putting him out of comission. Oh, and guess what? WE get penalty for flipping. Apparently, the flipping of our robot was considered "normal game play".

And somethings were just dumb. "You're pinning! Move back in ten seconds or a penalty!" (we move back in eight, and move forward to pin again) "HEY! You're high speed ramming! PENALTY!" During our last game, our team wanted to say something along the lines of, "You bastard, you have NO idea what high speed ramming is. You're a horrible ref, and we're now going to show you what REAL ramming looks like btich. MR. SULU! FULL POWER!"
(considering we hardly ever went to full speed in the game, and usually pushed people around at 1/3 speed, full speed would be...devastating. Especially to a less protected robot).

Why is it that one ref after us? Well, we got a motive from him. On his grad year from his school three years ago, we were a bully bot (again) and kicked his team's ass. So, three year's later, he's now the ref for the game. And hey, it's payback time! And the head ref is too much of a pansy to do anything about it, even when we have proof that it was a bad call.

Oh, we also got extremely screwed by our teammates. We had one ONE guy in the top 20, who was 17th, and it was a match where we got stuck in a tetra in autonomous mode. No excuse, but it was a mistake on our part. Never happened again. In fact, the average ranking of our teammates is 47th place. And the average difference between our alliances and our opponent's allinace's ranking was about 20.

Our team, as a bully, cannot function without a good robot working behind us to score goals. But you know something's damn wrong when one of the only two (or three later on in the game) robots without and arm or any goal capping mechanism is the only one who scores goals. Not just one game, but three! (BTW, this includes the game against Yoshi's bot. Yes, we scored three points. Our allies basically SAT there the whole game and did nothing at all. Those morons.)

So, yeah, we came in 63rd out of 68 teams. Some guy handed the ref a contact number to get his eyes checked. Especially when he kept saying, "I saw you with my own eyes clearly ramming the other guy".

Rant = Over

dang, thast so sad, i hate when that happens!

its like in my school we do like these physical fitness tests and my PE teacher stopped my on my 36th situp because i lifted my hand liek 2 inches off the floor. and the guy next to me was lifting his hand like all the way to the roof! and my PE techer let him go on. i was like WTF IS THAT!??

anyways, i think robots are cool. but the way you talk about your robot, it seems to be liek the strongest robot in the wrold lol.

Um, the descoring was basically impossible. The other team was supposed to be penalized for descoring out tetra, but apparently, we did it. Don't know how, but hey, it's not like it friggin' hard defying the laws of physics.

And yes, we had to cruise around and move people at 1/3rd speed, or else it would really be high speed ramming. No, it wasn't the greatest robot ever, because we had no good arm, or anything to cap goals. And the reason why we were able to do so well was because of an amazing driver.

Note that we went to full power when we hit other robots, but only after we "contacted" them. As in we'd drive up to them, and then go to full power. What would be devastating would be going full power from one end of the field, and crashing into another robot. The momentum built up during the crossing of the field would, for a relatively tall robot, flip them at the very least, if not break the robot. Of course, we'd be disabled right after that because it would be quite un-sportsman like. We would probably be disqualified from the tournament.

So yeah, we didn't do it, because we ARE more responsible than that. Plus, we really didn't want to kill somebody's robot, because it isn't their fault that the ref was a bastard. But we wanted to spite the ref anyways. Oh well, like my teacher said, "Don't stoop down to that level, suck up your gut and take it."

ooh, jsut like this:



i believe that was in someones siggy before.

though i dunno if that has anything to do with this...lol.

Heh, not exactly. He's NOT an idiot. He was just out to screw us over.